How to select one row randomly taking into account a weight?

Question

I have a table which looks like that:

id: primary key
content: varchar
weight: int

What I want to do is randomly select one row from this t

Answer 1

A simple approach (avoiding joins or subqueries) is to just multiply the weight by a random number between 0 and 1 to produce a temporary weight to sort by:

SELECT t.*, RAND() * t.weight AS w 
FROM table t 
ORDER BY w DESC
LIMIT 1

To understand this, consider that RAND() * 2x will be a larger value than RAND() * x approximately two thirds of the time. Consequently, over time each row should be selected with a frequency that's proportional to its relative weight (eg. a row with weight 100 will be selected about 100 times more often than a row with weight 1, etc).

Update: this method doesn't in fact produce the correct distributions, so for now don't use it! (see the comments below). I think there should still be a simple method similar to the above that will work, but for now the more complex method below, involving joins, might be better. I'm leaving this answer up because: (a) there's relevant discussion in the comments below, and (b) if/when I get a chance, I'll try to fix it.